As we approach the centennial of the first installment of the 20th century's over eighty years of catastrophic hot and cold wars there remains unfinished business which existed at the eve of that event which influences current events.

It is fair to assert that smoldering religious issues were among the "causus belli". However, they were hardly the only ones and more often than not they merely masked the underlying political and economic ones and the gross miscalculations which ultimately led to the war.

OK, I have looked through the comments on this thread and it is disturbing how little people know about the history of WWI. The belief that WWI started because of Roman Catholic canon law is preposterous at best and disingenuous at worst. Seriously, if the Catholics followed the canons they'd still be Orthodox so "Roman Catholic canon law" is an oxymoronic term.

As for the causes of WWI, one must look closer to home. On June 18th, 1914 in the Mexican Revolution the Constitutionales took San Luis Potosi. The Constitutionals fought against General Huerta who was supplied by the Germans. Within 10 days a Serbian Nationalist offed Archduke Franz Ferdiand - the cousin of Maximillian I of Mexico's grandnephew's fourth aunt - and the Mexican Revolution spread to Europe.

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Shipbuilding. Interesting. Do you think that the British were rebuilding their navy after the US was forced to use nuclear weapons at the Delaware River on Christmas Day to finish the War of 1812 which was fought to halt the spread of Communism when England invaded the Republic of Vermont?

There is a reason why folks look for explanations for certain events, like WWI--such events do not make sense to them. I do not blame them in the case of WWI, a war that appears to have been started by leaders afflicted by the same mental illness. I like to liken events like the WWI to tremors and earthquakes that are mere manifestations of primary causes, such as the shifting of earth's plates. I suspect that the reason was the changeover from the agricultural to industrial age.

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Shipbuilding. Interesting. Do you think that the British were rebuilding their navy after the US was forced to use nuclear weapons at the Delaware River on Christmas Day to finish the War of 1812 which was fought to halt the spread of Communism when England invaded the Republic of Vermont?

I don't think that's likely. There was enough self-inflicted damage by the still largely untested nuclear weapons that US ship-building and other facets of commerce were disrupted enough to lead to the effective draw between the two warring nations. However, it must be realized that the UK supported Spain against Napoleon's invasion of that country. Spain required assistance to fend off the Hawaiians who had been emboldened by their defeat of Captain James Cook in the previous century, and were preparing to lend naval support to the inland Republic of Paraguay that had just declared its independence from Spain. This led to the superiority of the British in the southern hemisphere, and within a couple of decades the establishment of a colony on the Falkland Islands.

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Shipbuilding. Interesting. Do you think that the British were rebuilding their navy after the US was forced to use nuclear weapons at the Delaware River on Christmas Day to finish the War of 1812 which was fought to halt the spread of Communism when England invaded the Republic of Vermont?

I don't think that's likely. There was enough self-inflicted damage by the still largely untested nuclear weapons that US ship-building and other facets of commerce were disrupted enough to lead to the effective draw between the two warring nations. However, it must be realized that the UK supported Spain against Napoleon's invasion of that country. Spain required assistance to fend off the Hawaiians who had been emboldened by their defeat of Captain James Cook in the previous century, and were preparing to lend naval support to the inland Republic of Paraguay that had just declared its independence from Spain. This led to the superiority of the British in the southern hemisphere, and within a couple of decades the establishment of a colony on the Falkland Islands.

That is brilliant. I never put two and two together with the nuclear strikes at Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga with the Peninsular War and Captain Cook's involvement in the Chaco War! (Damnable Hawaiians and their mustard gas!)

There is a reason why folks look for explanations for certain events, like WWI--such events do not make sense to them. I do not blame them in the case of WWI, a war that appears to have been started by leaders afflicted by the same mental illness. I like to liken events like the WWI to tremors and earthquakes that are mere manifestations of primary causes, such as the shifting of earth's plates. I suspect that the reason was the changeover from the agricultural to industrial age.

You must read Kissinger's "Diplomacy". It was all a matter of balance of power. The various powers set up the dominoes and all it too was one good hard blow to send them all toppling.

France was still less than pleased with that whole Franco-Prussian war thing, but Bismarck was the king of realpolitik, and kept France isolated. England and the US were plenty happy to be isolationist with England's disdain for things on the continent and the US's bizarre exceptionalism. Germany and Russia had a nonaggression pact which kept them out of the game, and Austria knew that they were Germany's prison currency so did whatever the Prussians told them to. (Prusso-Austrian was kept them in check.) The Danes who had also been smacked around by Germany in the 1870's and by the British in the 1800-1810's. They just wanted out.

Well, Kaiser Bill was a bit of a doofus so he challenged England navally and started looking at overseas expansion (thinks Bismarck avoided) so they started getting antsy (genesisone touched on this above - despite our silliness, his first bit I quoted is factual). He let the nonaggression pact expire with Russia who then needed an ally (and France was more then happy to help!).

So you have France and Russia in the Red corner and Germany and Austria in the blue. Austria and Russia had both been eyeing the Balkans at the expense of the Sick Man of Europe. Serbia shoots Ferdi and the Germans tell the Austrians they have their back and they get ready to go all gangwar on Serbia. The Russians say they will get involved since Serbia is Orthodox (and a VERY convenient political ally in the Balkans) and the Austrians are cool with that b/c they got the Germans behind them.

France tells Russia that if they still want to go at it, the Frogs will have their back, and now you have a clusterfudge of diplomacy. England still wants to stay out but says if Germany attacks Belgium they will have to come in. Germany (did I mention that Kaiser Bill was a dingleberry?) invades Belgium just like the kid whose mommy tells him that if he sings one move verse of John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt while she's driving on icy roads in Western Nebraska...and England gets up in this. When Russia goes down they need a new ally so the Brits and Wilson fill a passenger liner to the gills with explosives and tell all the civillians to ignore that Kraut ambassador on the docks. Germans can no longer be honourable and let passengers off since the Brits have been using Q-Ships and the boat goes kablooey with the help of a torpedo.

But I digress, WWI was a perfect storm but it is very understandable when you take into account that Europe was embroiled in power politics and any nation that got isolated was toast on the international scale. Everyone tried to balance one another out with evermore entangled alliances. So it really doesn't matter whether the powder keg was lit by a Papal Canon decree or if the Serbs just gakked some Archduke for the shiites and grins of it, or if as I suggested humourously that it was an extension of the Mexican Revolution...all that matters is that the sides were balanced and everyone was itching to fight.

Right now the US has hegemonic rule (slipping away, though it be) but in the near future we are going to have a larger number of more or less evenly balanced players on the world stage and they will probably get into alliances once again just to maintain the status quo. I say, give us 50 years and we'll have another WWI-esque war.

There is no love of the Code of Canon Law in the Melkite Church.I know many Eastern Catholic priests and even bishops who detest it as it has changed the wording of Sacred Canons.

Okay, so they do. I don't purport to know anything about this code of canon law nor about the Melkite and Eastern Catholic hatred for it, so I'm not going to comment on any of that. I just think you should either submit much stronger proof of your claim that this code of canon law helped trigger World War I or disavow your claim as the piece of garbage history it is.

If you had read the book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, with an open mind, you would see the connection. But I guess that is too much to ask.

I cannot quote major portions of Cornwell's book without incurring copyright violations, and I will not waste my time babying people who refuse to read and learn history.

You expect me to go the library at 11:00 on a Saturday night and then read that book from cover to cover in just 15 minutes to see the connection you want me to see!!? Yes, that is too much to ask. Way too much to ask.

You made the claim. You therefore bear the burden of proof to offer evidence for your claim. Doing nothing more than tell me to read a book is making me do your dirty work for you, which I refuse to do. You either submit to this thread proof for your outlandish claim or concede that your claim will be thrown out with yesterday's garbage. It's really that simple.

Logged

I would be happy to agree with you, but then both of us would be wrong.

When Russia goes down they need a new ally so the Brits and Wilson fill a passenger liner to the gills with explosives and tell all the civillians to ignore that Kraut ambassador on the docks. Germans can no longer be honourable and let passengers off since the Brits have been using Q-Ships and the boat goes kablooey with the help of a torpedo.

Ah, finally someone who admits why the Lusitania went down so quickly. I never believed the old torpedo setting off coal dust explanation. Even the U-boat Kaptain himself was amazed that one little torpedo made such a big boom. Mussi terrorists were not the first to shield their bad stuff with civilians. Way to go USA.

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I would be happy to agree with you, but then both of us would be wrong.

There is no love of the Code of Canon Law in the Melkite Church.I know many Eastern Catholic priests and even bishops who detest it as it has changed the wording of Sacred Canons.

Okay, so they do. I don't purport to know anything about this code of canon law nor about the Melkite and Eastern Catholic hatred for it, so I'm not going to comment on any of that. I just think you should either submit much stronger proof of your claim that this code of canon law helped trigger World War I or disavow your claim as the piece of garbage history it is.

If you had read the book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, with an open mind, you would see the connection. But I guess that is too much to ask.

I cannot quote major portions of Cornwell's book without incurring copyright violations, and I will not waste my time babying people who refuse to read and learn history.

You expect me to go the library at 11:00 on a Saturday night and then read that book from cover to cover in just 15 minutes to see the connection you want me to see!!? Yes, that is too much to ask. Way too much to ask.

You made the claim. You therefore bear the burden of proof to offer evidence for your claim. Doing nothing more than tell me to read a book is making me do your dirty work for you, which I refuse to do. You either submit to this thread proof for your outlandish claim or concede that your claim will be thrown out with yesterday's garbage. It's really that simple.

He is doing no such thing. While I think he's being a bit unreasonable, he most certainly is not calling her a liar. Lazy, maybe, but not a liar.

Logged

"Hearing a nun's confession is like being stoned to death with popcorn." --Abp. Fulton Sheen

There is no love of the Code of Canon Law in the Melkite Church.I know many Eastern Catholic priests and even bishops who detest it as it has changed the wording of Sacred Canons.

Okay, so they do. I don't purport to know anything about this code of canon law nor about the Melkite and Eastern Catholic hatred for it, so I'm not going to comment on any of that. I just think you should either submit much stronger proof of your claim that this code of canon law helped trigger World War I or disavow your claim as the piece of garbage history it is.

If you had read the book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, with an open mind, you would see the connection. But I guess that is too much to ask.

I cannot quote major portions of Cornwell's book without incurring copyright violations, and I will not waste my time babying people who refuse to read and learn history.

You expect me to go the library at 11:00 on a Saturday night and then read that book from cover to cover in just 15 minutes to see the connection you want me to see!!? Yes, that is too much to ask. Way too much to ask.

You made the claim. You therefore bear the burden of proof to offer evidence for your claim. Doing nothing more than tell me to read a book is making me do your dirty work for you, which I refuse to do. You either submit to this thread proof for your outlandish claim or concede that your claim will be thrown out with yesterday's garbage. It's really that simple.

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Shipbuilding. Interesting. Do you think that the British were rebuilding their navy after the US was forced to use nuclear weapons at the Delaware River on Christmas Day to finish the War of 1812 which was fought to halt the spread of Communism when England invaded the Republic of Vermont?

Vamrat--While you have given us a good decription of what happened, I continue to think that the balance of power explanation is but an intermediate one. We should dig deeper.

Indeed. In history you always must!

I think this goes all the way back to the Treaty of Westphalia and the creation of the Nation-State as this set up how modern nations operate diplomatically. While the rise of Non-State Actors is changing the face of modern politics and diplomacy I don't think you can begin to look at any political exchange involving Europeans or Europeanized people between 1648 and 1945 without taking this into account (probably later but I view 1945 as a changing point in history that we haven't seen through to its conclusion yet).

That out of the way, I think the Napoleonic Wars were the next major evolution in modern European history. Especially the Concert of Europe / Vienna System that followed it. Before that you only had a few major players in Europe, the ones that unified earliest - England, France, and Spain. But after the Napoleonic Wars you had a lot more unification. Russia had been a player in Europe since at least the Seven Years War but with their major role in the Napoleonic Wars their position was cemented. The old rotting Holy Roman Empire (which was neither Holy, Roman, nor and Empire really) was replaced by a bunch of small German states (pretty much what it had been before) but now with Prussia as the obvious front-runner. The Austro-Hungarians cemented their role in the new Europe (as the Habsburgs they had been playing a major role in the old Europe) and began expanding throughout central Europe. By the late 1800 the old small states were mostly gobbled up, especially after the unifactions of Germany and Italy in the 1860's and 70's. Pretty much every big name in Europe in the late 1800's was represented in WWI - Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the old holdover from the Middle Ages - the Ottoman Empire.

With the breakdown of the Concert of Europe you have all these major powers who need to find someway to maintain the peace that Metternich and his successors had been doing since 1815. Basically, any two powers in Europe could beat any single nation-state, so any time one pair allied, the most likely target had to find a pairing as well. Thus Germany + Austria had to become France + Russia. Italy might have been able to shift the balance but the Germans were just too strong, but were matched nicely by the British as soon as the Kaiser gave them a reason to get involved. I think having the Ottomans balanced the Italians out. Once Russia went down the Western Allies needed to redress the balance and were skillful in getting the US involved.

I think that the balance of powers was the powder keg and this need for balance was caused by no one country being powerful enough to stand on its own against other powers.

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Shipbuilding. Interesting. Do you think that the British were rebuilding their navy after the US was forced to use nuclear weapons at the Delaware River on Christmas Day to finish the War of 1812 which was fought to halt the spread of Communism when England invaded the Republic of Vermont?

Was that before or after first contact with Klingons?

Well before. I believe that contact was made with Vulcans well before contact with the Kingons. Contact with the Vulcans goes back to that time Ben Franklin was flying that kite in a tornado down in Kansas and it hit Warp 1 sending the girl he was hitting on to Australia (they called it "Oz" in the History Channel documentary I saw, but I heard some New Zealanders referring to Australians as Ozzies once).

Actually, it was the sinking of the Titanic that brought on WWI. Naval supremacy was all-important in the early 20th century. The star of British ship building proved to be a disaster. This was the signal for Germany which was in an expansionist mode the impetus to engineer events that triggered war within a very few years.

(No, I don't plan to defend what I've written here - just pointing out that it's easy to see what we expect and want to see. Reality is more complex than that.)

Shipbuilding. Interesting. Do you think that the British were rebuilding their navy after the US was forced to use nuclear weapons at the Delaware River on Christmas Day to finish the War of 1812 which was fought to halt the spread of Communism when England invaded the Republic of Vermont?

I don't think that's likely. There was enough self-inflicted damage by the still largely untested nuclear weapons that US ship-building and other facets of commerce were disrupted enough to lead to the effective draw between the two warring nations. However, it must be realized that the UK supported Spain against Napoleon's invasion of that country. Spain required assistance to fend off the Hawaiians who had been emboldened by their defeat of Captain James Cook in the previous century, and were preparing to lend naval support to the inland Republic of Paraguay that had just declared its independence from Spain. This led to the superiority of the British in the southern hemisphere, and within a couple of decades the establishment of a colony on the Falkland Islands.

That is brilliant. I never put two and two together with the nuclear strikes at Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga with the Peninsular War and Captain Cook's involvement in the Chaco War! (Damnable Hawaiians and their mustard gas!)

Did you write your dissertation on this, may I ask?

No. My focus of studies was the Nazca Lines. It turns out that they were drawn by adventurers from the Khmer Empire who tunneled directly through the Earth's core (check Google maps to see that this is correct). The key to that was that there is some evidence that the artwork bears resemblances to that used in the khit cloth for which the Ubon Ratchathani Province of Thailand is well known. This connects to my knowledge of WWI in that in the late 19th century, Thailand was on the verge of announcing the development of laser weapons of mass destruction. Britain and Germany felt obliged to do battle with each other in order to commandeer that prize.

I know all of this thanks to my years at Grassy Knoll University (Roswell, NM, campus), with a semester at the International Loch Ness Institute of Marine Biological Research. I am also indebted to the Sasquatch Academy of Advanced Studies, located in Old Crow, Yukon, for an internship in historical fact finding and analysis.